DIP-R1: Deep Inspection and Perception with RL Looking Through and Understanding Complex Scenes

MLLMs have demonstrated significant visual understanding capabilities, yet their fine-grained visual perception in complex real-world scenarios, such as densely crowded public areas, remains limited. Inspired by the recent success of RL in both LLMs and MLLMs, in this paper, we explore how RL can enhance visual perception ability of MLLMs. Then we develop a novel RL-based framework, Deep Inspection and Perception with RL (DIP-R1) designed to enhance the visual perception capabilities of MLLMs, by comprehending complex scenes and looking through visual instances closely. DIP-R1 guides MLLMs through detailed inspection of visual scene via three simply designed rule-based reward modeling. First, we adopt a standard reasoning reward encouraging the model to include three-step reasoning process: 1) comprehending entire visual scene, 2) observing for looking through interested but ambiguous regions, and 3) decision-making for predicting answer. Second, a variance-guided looking reward is designed to encourage MLLM to examine uncertain regions during the observing process, guiding it to inspect ambiguous areas and mitigate perceptual uncertainty. This reward promotes variance-driven visual exploration, enabling MLLM to reason about region-level uncertainty and explicitly indicate interpretable uncertain regions. Third, we model a weighted precision-recall accuracy reward enhancing accurate decision-making. We verify its effectiveness across diverse fine-grained object detection data consisting of challenging real-world scenes, such as densely crowded scenes. Built upon existing MLLMs, DIP-R1 achieves consistent and significant improvement across various in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios, outperforming various existing baselines and SFT method. Our findings highlight the substantial potential of integrating RL into MLLMs for enhancing capabilities in complex real-world perception tasks.